163: Resilience Is The Real Infrastructure, with Tony Crescenzo

Pressure tests every organization, and Tony Crescenzo believes resilience isn’t a perk—it’s the infrastructure that keeps the mission alive. 

We sit down with the Marine veteran turned CEO of Intelligent Waves and founder of Peak Neuro to unpack a practical, values‑driven approach to leadership that holds up under pressure. Tony draws a clear line between management and leadership, showing how minimizing deviation from the plan differs from inspiring people to make a vision real and their own. 

Across the conversation, we get specific about what it takes to build resilient teams: start with “What do you need?”, focus on outcomes over style, and make values usable in daily decisions. 

Tony frames values as the attributes of the perfect colleague, then ties them to performance, rewards, and behavior. His integrity metric is simple and memorable: the distance between what you say and what you do. By publishing his leadership philosophy and filtering choices through two lenses—what serves the customer and what serves the employee—he reduces fear, speeds decision‑making, and scales trust.

Tony also opens up about his own PTSD and the science that changed his life. He explains how chronic stress impairs the prefrontal cortex and why resilience should be treated like cybersecurity or logistics: if it fails, the mission is compromised. 

If you care about leadership, psychological safety, and building teams that bend rather than break, you’ll find clear principles and tactics you can use today. 

Tony Crescenzo is the founder of Peak Neuro, LLC, a pioneering, AI-powered, neuroscience-based platform focused on enhancing cognitive resilience and performance, and the CEO of Intelligent Waves (IW), a leading IT integrator for the U.S. government.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Resilience Reframed As Infrastructure
• 0:18 Meet Tony Crescenzo
• 1:03 Overthinking To Inner Peace
• 3:15 From Performative To Competence
• 5:15 Defining Leadership As Dialogue
• 7:35 Positional Power To Field Effect
• 10:55 Managing At Scale Through Vision
• 14:01 Leadership As Art, Not Algorithm
• 17:05 Training Stress And Resilience
• 21:02 Values As The Perfect Colleague
• 23:42 Integrity, Clarity, And Consistency
• 25:46 Direct Leadership And Care
• 26:51 PTSD Journey And Peak Neuro
• 29:11 At‑Home Brain Tech For Recovery

Transcript

Tony Crescenzo: 0:01

The challenge with resilience is that way too many leaders see it as something nice to have, you know, something you talk about in a wellness seminar. That's really the wrong frame. Resilience is the infrastructure that keeps an organization functioning under pressure.

Manya Chylinski: 0:18

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, Manya Chylinski. My guest today is Tony Crescenzo. He's the founder of Peak Neuro and the CEO of Intelligent Waves and a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His work is defined by a commitment to resilience and technological innovation. We talked about resilience. We talked about leadership, leading with values, and starting out by asking people, what do you need? I really enjoyed my conversation with Tony, and I think you're going to as well. Tony, I'm so glad we're finally sitting down and talking. Thank you for being a guest.

Tony Crescenzo: 0:56

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

Manya Chylinski: 0:58

First question everyone gets this year. What would be the title of the book about you if it was written by your worst enemy?

Tony Crescenzo: 1:10

Boy, that's a really interesting one. I've got a couple of those. I was thinking about kind of what that might look like. And if it was my worst enemy, I think I might call the title Overthinking My Way to Inner Peace, uh, Field Guide to Tony being unreasonably calm.

Manya Chylinski: 1:27

I love that title. It's very specific.

Tony Crescenzo: 1:31

Well, I tend to, you know, have this um, I don't know what you would call it. I've had this proclivity for most of my career, where I think people become, not all people, but a vast plurality of people that I interact with in business tend to be intimidated by me. And it's, I don't think it's because I'm pretty sure if I've spoken to others, I don't think it's because I'm overbearing. It's because I'm not performative. You know, one of the things that I've I've noticed uh in the 31 years that I've been doing this is most people who ascend through the corporate hierarchy do so because they play the game. And by play the game, they understand the politics and they know they know what to say without being offensive. And they know they're very good at the performative mass uh aspects. And competence comes second. And I'm more of a competence guy, so I I sort of push aside the performative parts. And when that's what gets you in the room, it really messes people up.

Manya Chylinski: 2:34

I so hear you when you say that. I feel like this is why we've connected so well. I'm also not into that performative stuff. Um, but thank you for sharing that. And to get us started in the conversation, you know, everyone has had some moment in their life that changes how they think about being a leader or how they think about taking care of others around them. What is one of those moments for you?

Tony Crescenzo: 3:02

Well, you know, I've I've had a hundred of those or more in uh in my career. You know, m most recently I really started to think about in terms of leadership, what do people need? Leadership isn't something you do to someone, leadership is a dialogue, it's a it's a conversation, right, between a leader and a lead. And if uh if either party doesn't pay attention, uh then you go off the rails. And more often than not, it's the leader who fails to pay attention, not the lead. So really understanding, you know, meeting people where they are and understanding where you really want them to be, and then just being direct and honest about that, creates a I I call it, uh I call that field effect leadership, right? When when you start out as a leader, especially if you have a military background, your entire authority rests on the little chevrons or the bars on your collar, right? I'm a lieutenant, you have to listen to me, I'm a sergeant, corporals have to listen to me. It's positional leadership. And you you begin to ascend a ladder of competence as a leader, where you go from that to um it's more about relationships and then it becomes more about strategy. But you as you practice and you learn, I think a lot of uh high-level leaders get to the point where you don't even need to be in the room. It's not really so much about leadership, it's about creating the environment where people can be their best, right? Where they can express themselves to the to their fullest in the frame of the work that you do. Whatever, you know, whatever that work is. You want to allow people to sort of become who they are within that model. So it's um, you know, it's hard when you're a leader and you think, well, I've done this so long and I know the answer, to let people fail or to let people try things. And as you get older, you start to realize maybe they're not gonna fail. Maybe they're gonna come up with a better way than you had. And that's tough, right? So it's a little challenging, but it's really satisfying if you can put your ego aside. So, you know, for me, one of the big lessons was not to not to judge so much or be critical so much around how someone was doing something or why someone was doing something, but really looking at the outcomes. And when you focus on outcomes, you give people the opportunity to get there their own way. And it becomes, it becomes theirs, right? It's uh you get to the point in your career for a lot of folks where it doesn't have to necessarily be good or bad, but it's got to be mine. And giving people that opportunity is what leadership's about.

Manya Chylinski: 5:30

Okay. So interesting. You started with the question, what do you need? And as you were saying that, I thought to myself, a leader, however, we want to define that, after a certain point, you have more than one person who you are leading, likely. And at a certain point, it becomes unsustainable to ask an individual, what do you need? And I was thinking, so how do you do that? But as you moved on, you talked about focusing on the outcomes, not on how the person does it. But I'm curious from your perspective, how do you lead a large number of people if, as you say, being a leader is asking what do people need?

Tony Crescenzo: 6:11

It's a great question. Let's start with what is leadership, at least my my definite of leadership. Oftentimes people confuse management with leadership, right? Management to me is about nothing more than minimization of deviation from plan. And that's important, right? In business, in the military, and nonprofits, and anywhere you go, there are quantitative metrics, quantitative issues that have to be addressed. You either make or don't make a date. You either make or don't make profit. That that's management. I set a date, I have to complete a date. It's it's essentially, as I said, minimizing deviation from plan. So, what is leadership? Well, leadership is about getting people so inspired by your vision of the future that they not only make it real, they make it their own. So it's not so much about the plan, it's about the future. A good leader lays out a vision for the future and allows people to find their way to that place. And that works, I think, at scale, because what it does is it attracts people to that vision who embrace it and it repels people who don't, literally. It will, you know, people who don't want that vision of the future will go find another one. And that's perfectly fine. I think it's uh it's entirely appropriate in that case. And when you look at the world that way, relationships with individuals cease to be transactional and they begin to be much more long-term. Right? I've had I've had employees who didn't work out at one company. I've had employees that I've I've fired and hired them again in a different company because it was a different situation. And employees didn't very well in one business or one area and didn't do so well in another. But the issue is it's not really about the person, it's about the fit, right? Meeting them where they are. So for an you you can manage people all you want and lead people all you want, but at the end of the day, the interaction has to happen with persons, not people.

Manya Chylinski: 8:04

Mm-hmm. Yes. Okay. And I appreciate the distinction between management and leadership. We often conflate the two, and somebody who is a manager can be a leader, but they are not the same kind of tasks. It's not the same kind of focus. Interesting.

Tony Crescenzo: 8:23

Well, you know, I've I've this is just my opinion, but it's also my experience in life that you can teach management. It's um it's it's quantitative. So if you understand algorithms, if you understand math, you can pretty much teach management. Leadership is um leadership is like a talent in that your ability to develop skills in leadership are limited by the the level of your talent, right? If if I I, for example, will never be a world-class tennis player. I can play tennis and I might even win a match against somebody who's worse than me, but my talent only takes me so far. And I think for for folks who are interested in leadership as an occupation or leadership as a as a calling, because I don't I don't think leadership really ever is an occupation, um, you you really got to understand that there are there are techniques, tips, training that you can get around leadership. But leadership is a lot more esoteric and emotional, I think, you know, than um than management is. Leadership is more art than science. There are many, many measures of management, but there's only really one measure of leadership, and that's whether or not that vision that the leader lays out becomes real. There's negative leadership, there's positive leadership. There's lots of leadership styles, right? I can be authoritative, I can be commanding, I can be a servant leader, I can be a visionary. Um, that's not one size fits all. It's it's what's in your toolbox, going back to what do people need, whether that's an individual or a group of people. And uh give you an example, the uh intelligent waves, the company that I run right now. I've been here almost six years when I first got here. Um, it was I had a completely different leadership style for the team because it's what they needed. And the leader who doesn't pay attention back to the dialogue part of the conversation, right? The uh we we needed someone who could sort of, when I came in originally, needed someone who could take the reins, lay out a plan, drive to a particular outcome. Uh, and once you get to that outcome, you've got to pivot to the next thing. Well, driving to that outcome requires someone in more of a commanding, authoritative style. And once you get there, people don't need that anymore. And if if you don't make a left turn when you when everybody else does, you're pretty much hanging out there by yourself, right? You're you've lost the you've lost the opportunity, you've lost the credibility to lead people because it's not one size fits all. That was my point.

Manya Chylinski: 10:52

Right, right. Absolutely. Well, you know, as a CEO, you know what this is like. You've done it, you've been in the trenches, you understand what you've done that left you hanging out there versus what you did that was really supportive. But to circle to the topic of the or the name of the podcast, how do you intentionally think about resilience and um like psychological safety within your team and be intentional about that to make sure that not only you're addressing what people need, but you're kind of addressing that psychological need as well.

Tony Crescenzo: 12:03

Yeah, you know, it's funny. The the challenge with resilience is that way too many leaders see it as something nice to have, you know, something you talk about in a wellness seminar. That's really the wrong frame. Resilience is the infrastructure that keeps an organization functioning under pressure. My dad used to say, it was my dad was a very simple guy, but every once in a while something went wrong, he'd say, Well, you know, some days the bear eats you, some days you eat the bear. Um, if you hang around with people long enough, you're going to see the best and worst of them. And that typically happens uh within circumstances, right? If we I I I don't think there's a single crisis that a CEO could face that isn't on my personal bingo card that I haven't been through. And when you build resilient teams, they survive you, whether you stay, whether you go. So if you have a team that's let me go back. I I think resilience is the infrastructure that keeps an organization functioning under pressure. So if you have a team that's operating in a complex or uh high consequence environments, that mental and physiological stability of your workforce directly affects your ability to execute. You know, there are times when things are going pretty well, everybody's happy, but more often than not, something is going to happen that's going to create fear, uncertainty, doubt, or chaos. And that's where resilience uh kicks in. So when people are uh chronically stressed or or uh dysregulated, you see slower decision making, more mistakes, higher turnover, degraded trust. And none of this is theoretical. This is 30 years of neuroscience on how stress impairs the prefrontal cortex talking here. I've seen this, right? So uh I frame resilience the same way I frame cybersecurity or mission logistics. If it fails, the mission's compromised. And if you're serious about readiness, you know, you can't hope that people will just gut it out. Hope is not a plan. Uh, building resilience in people means investing in the infrastructure to do that, allowing them to recharge when they need to. And actually, again, back to what do people need? Noticing, because most of us don't notice in frog in a pot, right? Things get crazy. I'll just, I'll just work harder, I'll just work harder, I'll just work harder until one day they quit because they just can't do it anymore. And their spouse is is upset with them because all they do is work, right? They find themselves in a place they never wanted to be. You know, a good leader looks at that and invests in people, not just in outcomes. Right.

Manya Chylinski: 14:28

And I appreciate that you are thinking about the concept of resilience as well, as strategic and also as an organizational responsibility. That yes, it is you know, my own resilience is my responsibility. How I manage my emotions or whatever's happening with me is my responsibility. But I appreciate that you acknowledge that I exist within the system. And if I'm working for you, that what's going on around me in the workforce is going to impact how I'm able to access my own resources.

Tony Crescenzo: 15:03

Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's an important um uh point for especially the those mid-level managers who are just sort of moving up in their careers and they're they're just now getting to the first parts where they're seeing things, first part of the career where they're saying things they haven't seen before. Uh uh impossible situations where there is no good or bad answer. There's only the least bad decision that they can make. And they look at that and they think, geez, I failed because I couldn't make the right, you know, the good choice. And even though there is no good choice, you know, as you get, as you go from sort of the beginning of management and leadership up to the very top of it, you go from these sort of very quantifiable, um, uh binary sorts of decisions into the gray area where nothing is black or white. There's always there's always a context, right? That that you have to evaluate. Um, there's always a trade-off between one thing or another. And so you have to be comfortable uh not just in ambiguity, not just comfortable in in ambiguity, but comfortable with the the challenge of multiple simultaneous cognitive uh issues going on, things that you you have to think about four, five, six things at a time. And it's coming at you like the the chubby guy in Animal House at the food king when they're throwing the stuff over their shoulders at them. You just can't uh you know, you just can't keep up with it. There comes a point when you have to take a deep breath, resenter yourself. And if you're prepared for it, it's kind of funny. I go back to my time in the Marine Corps. Um, when I was when I was in officer candidate school, which is not like boot camp, I've been to both. Um, boot camp makes Marines. Officer candidate school weeds out people that the enlisted Marines don't want to work for. And so they're their their entire focus is on beating the crap out of you until you give up. You can literally give up in OCS and quit. You can't quit boot camp. Well, you can, but it's it's a miserable experience. And one of the things I remember uh so well is uh having to march 20 miles with you know 80 pounds worth of gear in the rain, in the mud, stop, put up a tent, and then four or five times they will tell you, you you all you all sucked, the tents aren't right, you have to do it again over and over and over until you're so frustrated that you're all going to kill each other. And then they stop you and they have you come down and sit, and they and then they tell you, hey, this is physiological stress, this is psychological stress, this is what you just experienced. And look at what happened. And it's a real opportunity to, you know, in a situation like that in training to reflect on that. And we do that, we do that in a um at uh at IW. Every once in a while we'll have an off-site for managers, and we will contrive situations that are impossible to get through, waiting for the one person to say, hey, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense, right? And that's the person you really uh you got to love them up uh for doing that. But what we're doing is we're training resilience by overstressing, right? We in the military they talk about um bloody training to fight bloodless wars. And it's it's it's a very similar uh physiological and psychological approach when you can create a safe situation for people to practice these kinds of techniques in.

Manya Chylinski: 18:16

Right. That's so interesting that experience in the military and how you've carried that over to your leadership. That's not something I think a lot of people experience. If you've never been in the military in in any way, and I've certainly never been in a workforce where there was any attention paid to this, let alone any kind of training. So I think that's amazing giving people that experience in a in a safe environment, helping them understand.

Tony Crescenzo: 18:43

Thank you for that. But that again is one of those, there's no perfect solution. So I've had um folks go through that and then at the end of it call call it the Stanford Prison Experiment, right? That we never we never want to do that again. And you can you you know we're all works in progress. And I think early on in my attempts to do this, I uh I I may have created more damage than I resolved at some point, but lesson learned.

Manya Chylinski: 19:08

Well, lesson learned. And yeah, as you were talking earlier, I was thinking about my mind was going to just philosophical concepts of what is right and what is wrong and and and how you can't always there isn't always a choice that's 100% right or 100% wrong. Probably there's never, but you have to understand that ambiguity. And then how what's important in that moment is the value, your values, the organization's values. Because how do you make a decision? I mean, I guess that's a question. How do you make a decision? And how do you make a decision when some part of it is going to be bad or uncomfortable? And do we do a good job of training people to do that?

Tony Crescenzo: 19:56

Great question. I'll tell you how how I talk about my decisions at my level. I talk about this all the time with uh with colleagues and and with our uh with colleagues at work as well. Easy decisions make themselves, difficult decisions get made three levels below me. The really tough decisions get made by my direct reports. And by the time it gets to me, it's usually the choice between the really awful and the totally catastrophic. Those the the decision hierarchy, when you build an organization for resilience, doesn't require the leader of the organization to make a lot of those hard decisions. My my uh number one goal as a leader is that nobody has to ask themselves, what would Tony say? Right? I don't have to be in the room. You can see me coming from a thousand miles away. And so that that leads to, well, how do you build that kind of infrastructure? Well, every company, it's kind of interesting. Every company has a, or at least most companies have mission, vision, and values. How many employees actually know what they are? How many can tell you, right? So uh I went through this exercise early when I got to intelligent waves, and you know, we wound up with 10 values. And I had I had a whole slew of employees complain, that's too many values, too many values. And I said, Well, what is a value? What do the values really mean? And of course, you get a blank stare. And my answer to what the values are is an organization's values describe the attributes of the perfect colleague. What are all of the attributes of the person we want to work with? So tell me which one I can take away. Can I take away integrity? Can I take away honesty, communication, transparency? Which one of those doesn't work? Uncompromising ethics. And very soon people start to realize, hey, that's kind of true. And when you create performance management programs around the uh the living of those values, the expression of those values, when you reward people for those values, and when you model those values, right? That's the hard part. I think oftentimes we confuse honesty with integrity. And to me, uh honesty and integrity are two different things. You know, if you want people to understand how you make decisions, you need integrity. And integrity is the distance between what you say and what you do. If there's very little distance, you have high integrity, and so it's repeatable. When people watch, you're not you're not faced with the same set of circumstances making different choices every time. High integrity means that when you talk about what your values are, and it's kind of interesting. I have a um I have a document that every customer, every employee, every partner, That our company works with gets a copy of. When we when we win a new contract, we win a contract with U.S. courts to oversee all the cyber defense of the U.S. court system. I went down and met with the customer and I gave him this two-page summary. And it's called My Leadership Philosophy. And it's a it's a primer on what I'm about, how to work with me, what I value, what I stand for, what I won't stand for. And one of the things I talk about is how I make decisions. And in there, I talk about how every decision I make is filtered through two lenses. The first lens is what's in the best interest of our customers, because without customers, we don't have a company. And what's in the best interest of our employees. Everything else is a distant third. And so if you live that, if if when you make decisions, you show that if every decision that comes out of your organization comes out of your office, and people see is aligned with that, that alignment allows people sort of to feel good about lining up behind you. So, you know, you want to, there's three intentional behaviors that I think that that really matter: clarity, consistency, and tools that actually work. Right. You just an interesting aside, as we're talking here, I received an email from one of our employees who, in our defense business, which is separate from Peak Neuro, which is our entrainment uh technology and our human performance technology. I have a monthly town hall with all the employees. Anyone who wants to come in can come in. You can ask questions in advance. We like you to submit them in advance, but you ask them in the town hall, that's fine. And somebody asked the question, hey, can we get access to this app that is a resilience app that the military is using? And, you know, first thing that went through my mind was, boy, what a dummy. I should have offered this anyway. Of course we can do that. And about a week after we did this, one of the folks in one of our one of our departments, be any more specific because they might be listening, uh, reached out to me because they're, you know, their mother is uh going into hospice, they're cleaning up her house, they're getting ready to make this big move, and they're not sleeping. They're taking all kinds of drugs and it's just not working. And I literally said, Hey, look, you know, tell me what's going on. We sent her a version of the app that really helps with sleep. I think this was on a Thursday, Saturday morning. She sent me an email just thanking me how well it was working. And I just literally about an hour ago, I just checked in and sent her a note and said, How are things going? And got another note back. And I think those kinds of so to sort of tie this back, um, a lot of folks in the C-suite tend to think, well, I'll manage people who manage people. And that is that, you know, that is not the way to lead. You don't lead indirectly, you lead directly. And if that means you got to go talk to the receptionist or you got to go talk to the janitor, uh, everybody's job matters. I I never got that, you know. That uh, you know, I know a lot of CEOs who uh don't even make eye contact with people. I don't know how you run a business like that. Um if you want people to follow you, you better lead.

Manya Chylinski: 25:29

Right. You better be someone worth following.

Tony Crescenzo: 25:32

Yeah, amen.

Manya Chylinski: 25:33

Tony, thank you so much. We are almost out of time. So to wrap up, can you please share with our listeners a little bit more about yourself and your work and your companies and what you do?

Tony Crescenzo: 25:43

Well, I was um uh after my service in the Marine Corps, I went uh, I guess I went about 25 years not realizing that I was uh uh one of those veterans who suffers from PTSD, the the zero to FU in 10 seconds guys. Uh my first wife would tell you that, my daughter certainly knew, and my second wife uh uh wasn't too thrilled with how many times a week I woke her up with nightmares. And so I I discovered a technology that um that helped me recover from that very quickly, like inside of a month. And uh partnered with uh with the scientists who created that technology to found a company called Peak Neuro that now makes this uh this technology available to uh veterans, first responders. We're working with elite athletes. Something I learned very recently is that uh gymnasts have a very traumatic life. Uh the brain of a gymnast looks an awful lot like the brain of a Delta Force operator because there's a lot of coercion and discipline that goes with that, and it wrecks havoc on your on different parts of your brain. I I I'm working with a gymnast right now who was on the national team and the Olympic team who had several trips in their uh in their career to uh to Ireland, where they competed at the highest levels at the in world-class gymnastics and can't ever remember being in Ireland. So the technology itself is um one of the great things about it is, especially for people with PTSD or veterans or first responders, is you can do this at home. You can do it at home. There's no stigma, you don't have to talk about it. It's essentially a physiological resolution to trauma as opposed to a semantic resolution. I can tell you personally, no veteran wants to talk to someone who hasn't chewed the same dirt they have. And they certainly don't want to relive things that they didn't like. In fact, I'll tell you early on in my uh in my journey, I talked to a VA therapist who, after three sessions, told me they couldn't treat me because I was triggering them. So that's um there's also a sort of component to this. A study was done in 2021 by the Air Force, and uh, which basically concluded that the farther you go from your home for treatment, the lower the chances that your treatment will be successful. So we tend to send veterans and others into residential treatment programs that are a week or two and the the success rates of under 30%. Closer to home, the better it is. So you can sit at home and do this. It's 100% science-packed. It's a closed loop based on an EEG, personalized to your neurophysiology. You can try a sample of it on the App Store. It's called Peak Neuro. That's the app, or go to PeakNeuro.com and download it. It's free for 30 days. If you like it, great. If you want more than just the app, we have uh very specific programs that we put together for first responders, for military veterans, for active duty military. You can just reach out to us and sign up for a program.

Manya Chylinski: 28:39

Nice. Well, thank you for taking your own experience and helping others with it. I so appreciate that as someone who has had PTSD. Um, and thank you so much for having this conversation today. I've so enjoyed talking with you.

Tony Crescenzo: 28:53

It's great spending time with you. Thank you.

Manya Chylinski: 28:55

And thank you to our listeners. We will catch you on the next episode.